Asking the Right Questions: 24 Questionnaires that Worked!

Marketing research is both art and science. There are many “right” paths to finding the “truth” of a situation—discovering a new market, better understanding what customers think of your service, sizing up your competitors and many other marketing challenges. Marketing research is one of the most valuable tools available to managers. The question is whether you always need to start from scratch when trying to figure out which questions to ask given your current situation. I don’t think so.Over the past two decades, I’ve had the distinct honor of running over 1,000 customized surveys for a wide variety of leading companies facing an array of marketing, management and communications challenges. While every organization is unique, their challenges often have similarities to what other companies have experienced. There are a lot of trends and it is possible to learn from what others have done.What are these marketing challenges? This book contains eight sections that represent some of the most common marketing challenges. Each section includes three sample surveys. Some of the surveys are focused exclusively on one of these challenges, while others have only one section of questions devoted to the issue and other sections focused on other challenges or information needs.A brief description of each survey is listed under each of the eight sections below. The questions asked in each of the surveys are contained through this book, but the names of the companies and their specific products and other identifiers have been changed. These example questionnaires used a variety of methodologies, including telephone, mail, email, pass out, focus group and others.

Lloyd Corder, Ph.D., is founder and CEO of strategic marketing research firm CorCom, Inc. and teaches at Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. He is a frequent keynote, convention and motivational speaker, and he has appeared on business-oriented radio and television programs. Corder's studies have been published in more than 500 magazines and newspapers.